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We're in the final days of Oscar season, with the ceremony just six days away. With nominations in every acting category, as well as nods for Best Picture and Best Director, Silver Linings Playbook is among the top contenders this year. As Silver Linings Playbook has gained the attention of the public, so too have the film's central issues regarding mental health. The film has helped draw attention to efforts in Congress to reform our laws and health care system to give more attention to mental health, and the filmmakers and cast have gone to Capitol Hill to assist in those efforts.

I spoke with the film's director, David O. Russell (among the nominees for Best Director this year, his second directing nomination, after his nod for 2010's Best Picture nominee The Fighter), about the film and the subject of mental health at the heart of the story. He was quite open and gave an especially personal, insightful interview, for which I'm very grateful.

When you first read the book, did you quickly develop a sense of how to adapt it, or was it a difficult process for this story?

It took a lot of time. I think because I wasn't able to get the film up on the screen right away, the five years ended up being a benefit because I got to rewrite it many times. I kept adapting it and adapting it over those five years. And I made The Fighter, and then I would come back and rewrite it again, for Robert De Niro, and eventually Bradley Cooper and Jennifer [Lawrence].

So you keep adapting it, and keep making it more specific. It's a very specific balancing act of exactly how bipolar they are and how you portray that, as well as how to make the dramatic conceit of the picture grip you cinematically from beginning to end. Such as the off-screen wife, the letters, the pressure cooker of his issues and of his awareness, the secret agenda of the dance -- a lot of these devices from the book are ones that took a lot of rewriting to get into the mix that you see on screen.

Giving it some local color took a lot of [time]-- you keep making it more specific, to make it local. You were just talking [before the interview started] about [having lived in] New Orleans, well I love localities and I love what localities feel like, and I love specific characters. You know, there are a lot of good movies this year and ours is about very specific people in a very specific place in a very specific neighborhood. And that's what I'm drawn to now in cinema.

So, getting to know the season, we took the season that they [the Philadelphia Eagles] played, we found out the rituals, the superstitions, the bookmaking, the clothes, the food, the language, all that stuff. It's stuff that keeps getting more and more specific as you rewrite, all the way up to shooting.